It’s not what you know, it’s who you know—possibly the most common term thrown around in any given design industry. But surely, you can’t just make it by being Facebook friends with David Carson.
For anyone who’s made a great failure of their dream, they’ll have uttered that it mattered not what they knew but merely who they in-fact did not know; but can success be defined solely on the community that any given person floats in?
It’s worth noting that your connections are vital, they are your source of projects, source of entertainment and your socialising—but I doubt great design fails to be great if Debra Sussman never shook your hand. If your work is strong enough, it’s what you know that will develop who you know. That said, if you know nobody and show nobody great design may as well be a tree falling in the woods.
So here’s my conundrum. I believe that who you know is very important, but not the singular reason for any success. I too have seen my knowledge of a person beat out the knowledge of the subject held by others. This is because any person who hires you for work, is a human, and humans exist through interaction—friendliness, trust and communication are the basic principles of a good client relationship and a good human relationship.
Even if we are to take the analogy of ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ as objectively true; it still does not exclusively denote that your social circle defines your success. If in a career, it’s highly likely that who you know is built upon meeting people through what you know, your talents and interests inform the people you do or do not connect with. If all work came directly from a blind choice of person over knowledge, you’d still make that selection because you are known to the person because of the knowledge of any given discourse that caused you to meet.
To claim that any triumph should come from who you know is both a defeatist and a well-educated statement, because you discount the circumstance that defined the meeting between any given two people that may or may not heighten their success together. It is not a false statement, for it can prove true – as it often does – but it also is not objectively truthful.
So as a juvenile attempt to confuse you, here is my algorithm of social knowledge and technically knowledge, feel free to never use this to define whether your success or failure was of what you knew or who you knew.
If the work you are doing is for someone you’ve worked with before, then it’s both who and what you knew; though if the work is for someone you’ve never worked with before but know personally, then it’s who you knew—this is variable dependant on whether they have given the work to you dependant on previous examples of your work, then it becomes a matter of what you knew. This too can be debunked if the work is given to you blind from the recommendation of another, in this case it is neither truly who you know or what you know, but in-fact a passive knowledge of both. I now realise this isn’t as confusing as I once prescribed.
The truthful nature of the statement also relies on the stance from which it is said. For a put out student, struggling to make their way into the industry could exclaim this and it would prove untruthful but poignant through frustration, weighted by a naive understanding of social pyramids. For an art director to say the same statement, from their experience it may prove true for their situation – just as it was false for the student – but not factual overall, because their knowledge of the ‘who’ came from any persons knowledge of the ‘what’.
If you want to believe that it’s not what you know, but who you know then know that you are not such as mad as to cast stones in hope of catching fish, but you are also disregarding how any person can come to know who they know, or what they know.
It’s neither truthful nor a lie, it’s merely an observation of an end point of an extensive process professed with great pessimism. Obviously.
